Posted on 02/19/2017 6:49:29 PM PST by Colonel Kangaroo
Nearly a week since U.S. President Donald Trump fired national security adviser Michael Flynn, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul advised against appointing former U.N. Ambassador and White House Chief of Staff John Bolton.
Trump’s first choice, retired Navy special forces officer Robert Harward, who served under Defense Secretary John Mattis, turned down the position last week and reports say the White House has ruled out former CIA Director David Petraeus, who was ousted as the nation’s top spy amid a scandal over his sharing confidential documents with his mistress.
Flynn resigned last week amid questions on whether he discussed sanctions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
Trump is scheduled to meet Sunday with four possible replacements: Bolton, retired Army Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, who is acting national security adviser, Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster and the superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen. White House spokesman Sean Spicer said other interviews also could be scheduled.
In an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” Paul, R-Ky., a Libertarian who lost the 2016 Republican presidential nomination to Trump, said Bolton would push a foreign policy closer to that of Sen. John McCain,” R-Ariz.
“John Bolton still believes the Iraq war was a good idea, he still believes regime change is a good idea, he still believes that nation building is a good idea,” Paul said, adding, “My fear is that s secret wars would be developing around the globe. … I think he would be a bad choice.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press,” White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said he is “fully aware” of the facts that led up to Flynn’s ouster after less than a month on the job.
Some point after we were first tipped off and got to the point of reviewing whether he was being honest or not, after we got the report back from the White House counsel, that's when we looped in, or that's when the vice president was brought into the conversation more fully in regard to whether or not Michael Flynn was honest,” Priebus said.
Priebus added, however, he didn’t think Flynn’s actions rise to a criminal violation of the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from engaging in foreign policy.
Former CIA Director Leon Panetta, who served as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, said Trump needs to recognize that Russia is “an adversary, not a friend.”
“Their main purpose is to destabilize the United States and Western democracies. And they've shown that in everything they've done. So the president, I think ultimately must recognize that his first responsibility is to protect this country. And one of those you have to protect this country from is Russia,” Panetta said on “Meet the Press.”
“The only thing that would have saved Iraq was a brutal dictator ruling the country with an iron fist.”
You can’t say that! It’s true, but you can’t say it!
Really, the solution would be for some good old colonialism with an iron fist. But I can’t say that!
I'm not sure I'd consider anyone "fearless" if his defining characteristic has been his full support over the years for every U.S. military engagement that requires someone else to fight it.
I realize Rand Paul is not popular on FR and I did not think he was the guy to be Prez but I really like him and he’s right on many issues. Bolton is too much of a Neocon.
Georgia Girl I like Rand, he at least has been openly on POTUS TEAM!!! He has ALWAYS stood for SMALL government and I trust him a HELL OF A LOT MORE than LYIN RYAN, GRAHAMNESTY, McShame, I am SICK TO DEATH of the left ALWAYS out there SPEWING how WONDERFUL the SENIOR, HERO senator McSHAME is, when the MARXIST LEFT is consistently BRAGGING about how WONDERFUL one of OUR senators is YOU KNOW the guy is a POS!!!
Oh just stop. Every diplomat in the world is in that position and you know it. Now just chill with your hatred of any and all so-called “neo-cons” and let the guy do his job, cuz he will be great.
people conveniently forget (probably intentionally ignore) that the primary argument for invading iraq was WMD, which everyone on the planet — from bill clinton, to the UN, to harry reid, and john kerry — had argued vociferously for the better part of as decade that it was in the united states’ naitonal interest to remove.
and, quite frankly, were (a) not only there, but discovered, albeit not in the stockpiles that US intelligence universally assessed, and (b) said stockpiles were probably moved to syria while the french dicked us around in the security council.
the rest of your post is a grab bag of especially exquisite monday morning quarterbacking, but we’ll tick a few of them off. radical islam may have been suppressed within the boarders of iraq, but that is is a totally vacuous statement, since dictators, by definition, suppress just about everything. donald trump wasn’t on the menu in 2001, and if he had been, it’s entirely uncertain which party and which platform he would have run on. the entire notion that iraq was a flop is perhaps the most spectacular bit of revisionist dishonesty in american history — and that really is saying something. 50 or so americans were killed in iraq in 2010. the country was thoroughly pacified. it was critical to obama’s world view that the bush doctrine of preemption be retroactively proven false, no matter the consequences; liberals can’t function in a world were preemption is a provably effective foreign policy tool.
it’s just beyond me why alleged conservatives want to hand out obamite talking points — and the bit about GWB, our only president to even have an MBA, being stupid is undoubtedly the scuzziest liberal lie in several generations. I assume they just lost heart, or lost their spine, or decided that living in a world built on The Big Lie wasn’t so bad after all.
whatever the case, the truth is having a pretty rough go of it at here at FR where it pertains to the iraq war.
in the primaries, he came in 5th place in iowa. you didn't even run, and you almost tied him.
I haven't met a half dozen people who toss around the term "neocon" than can tell me what it means.
You need to thank God everyday that Rand Paul is in the US Senate fighting for your personal freedoms. There aren’t many who do.
I thank God every day that only one of ron paul’s 5 nutty offspring chose to go into politics.
Before showing your ignorance further why not research Rand Paul’s voting record and some of his speeches on the floor of the Senate. Then tell us all why specifically you object to his incessant need to fight for the Constitution. :-)
You have hit on an important distinction between conservatives and Republicans. Some of us never bought into a lot of the political cheerleading for GWB that was complete B.S. Very little of his agenda was conservative by any objective measure. The whole family — along with a lot of people who held positions in the Bush administration — exposed themselves as leftist frauds during the 2016 campaign. No wonder so many of them openly endorsed Hillary Clinton. She would have been GWB’s successor as an open-borders globalist in the White House.
Do you really believe Iraq was a threat to the U.S. that warranted the kind of military intervention we brought to that dump? Do you really believe Saddam Hussein had WMDs, but decided to ship them out of the country rather than use them to protect himself?
I’m not even talking about his background as a diplomat. He hasn’t been a a diplomat in more than a decade. He’s had the same tired routine in every position he’s held as a Beltway lobbyist and talking head since then.
yes and yes. so did both houses of congress. so did the bush administration, and the clinton administration that preceded it, and the bush administration that preceded that one. and so did 90-odd percent of the american public, as measured by every contemporaneous poll known to numbers.
It’s not that you’re entire argument is on shaky ground, it’s that your argument is a total sham.
I wonder, where was your holier than thou attitude when iraqis were taking turns riding the severed head of saddam hussein’s statue down the street? I’m guessing you didn’t feel quite so special then, or after the surge secured iraq. you only acquired your special glow after an extremist liberal abandoned the field, literally unwon the won war, and defiled the memories of every brave american that pacified that shit hole and made americans safer.
good luck with that.
It’s Army Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster.
I have nothing to hide in my background here on FreeRepublic. I have more than 64,000 posts here in my name, so you can go back through them yourself to see that I haven’t changed my tune at all on this subject over the years. That would certainly be wiser than to get on here and make assumptions about what people were thinking before you got here in 2009.
the join date card; when you absolutely, positively have nothing meaningful left to say.
I have plenty of meaningful things left to say. But I’m typing on an iPhone and can’t post a thorough response. I only mentioned your join date because you took it upon yourself to get on here and tell us what we were thinking and posting here before 2008.
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